The House of Sonia Sanchez

When the sun yawned and stretched this morning, Sonia Sanchez was eight decades deep into imagining a world where there is justice, peace, and beauty. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1934, nine years later she was in the flow of the Great Migration. She arrived in New York, and discovered a library in Harlem where there was food for the brain, the soul, the imagination. Sustenance that helped her grow into a giant.

Sonia Sanchez is a unique yet familial voice on the page, in the classroom, and on stage. The distinct voice of her work is flavored with the literature and music of her people and the world. Reading her work makes you want to experience her performance. Her performance leads you back to the page to contemplate the meaning and the magic of her words. She is a revered poet in so many communities, especially Black communities where her poems are heard in churches and schools, women’s clubs and HBCUs. She gets hailed in the store, restaurants, and on the street, celebrated especially by young women. Her life and poems are a song of what is possible.

An activist, artist, and intellectual, she chose to stand against the poison of racism, sexism, and militarism. She often paid for it with joblessness and financial precarity for her family. She never wavered, always determined to use her great gifts in service of the ideas she committed to. Mentored by women who came before her, Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker and others looked after her as creative spiritual mothers. Her poems flowed unabated in the Black Arts Movement and beyond. The explosion of Black artistic expression in the movement carried her into a multidisciplinary and multicultural family of artists. Poets and dramatists, dancers and painters, photographers and filmmakers, teachers and laborers, musicians, scholars, and students all continue to expand the incredibly large extended family of Sonia Sanchez. Although she retired from the classroom years ago, she continues to teach. She is a mentor to new generations of poets and artists who are creating, teaching, leading, and building the world she envisions.